


Concealed

by thesometimeswarrior



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Guilt, Hiding, Pre-Canon, Spoilers for Episode: s05e18 A Single Pale Rose, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 21:46:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15782742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: She slips into the cave as Rose Quartz, cradling her Diamond’s Gem to her chest, and it's only after Pearl hides the small entrance with nearby Earth fauna that she shape-shifts back into herself.Her first instinct is to sigh in relief. Her second is to cry out.After staging the shattering, Pearl goes into hiding with her Diamond's Gemstone as she waits for Pink to re-form.





	Concealed

She slips into the cave as Rose Quartz, cradling her Diamond’s Gem to her chest. It’s instinctual, she supposes, more of a display of reverence and respect and…care?...than anything else, even if practically speaking, it’s unnecessary. In her (fake, terribly, terribly _fake_ and _wrong_ ) Quartz hand, the Gem is concealed. 

It won’t be in her own hand. Her own hand is too small, built for dainty, pleasing work, built to be looked at, admired by her Diamond’s lessors. And, even though it’s calloused and cracked from a thousand years of fighting in a way for which it was never made, it remains what it is: the hand of a Pearl. (Does _she_ remain what she is, now? Is _she_ still a Pearl?) When she shapeshifts back into herself, she will need both hands to hold her Diamond, and the Gem won’t be concealed. 

(Though there will come several moments, in the coming days and weeks, when she _will_ conceal the Gem, wrap her whole physical form around it, when she hears the Homeworld drones swirling outside. They’ll be programmed specifically to look for and shatter a Rose Quartz Gemstone, of course, but in the off chance they can detect a Diamond, she will keep Pink hidden, so that their deception remains intact. And in the even more unlikely event that, like in some places on Homeworld, they’re programmed to shatter any Gem they find without discrimination, it will be even more crucial. Her own destruction won’t matter, obviously, except in so far as it would leave her Diamond exposed…to the scanners or to whatever else might come. So, for this reason and this reason only, when she wraps herself around the Gemstone, she’ll tuck her head in, bringing her own Gemstone as close to Pink’s as she can without touching it.)

* * *

Only after she hides the small entrance to the cave with nearby Earth fauna does she transform back into her own form. 

Her first instinct is to sigh in relief. Her second is to cry out, (though, thankfully, she manages to stifle herself.)

It hadn’t been _real_ , it had been a _show_ , part of the deception, she knows, she _knows_ , but the image of her Diamond’s pained face as she ran the sword through her replays over and over in her Gem’s eye. Pink Diamond’s normally soft features contorted in apparent agony. Her tensed, arched back, and head thrown foreward in the last instant before she disappeared into a poof of smoke and inside her Gem. Planned or not, Pearl had _impaled_ Pink Diamond— _her_ Diamond—with a sword so impressive Bismuth had smiled every time she talked about it. The pain, even anticipated, expected, _ordered_ , must have been tremendous. And _she_ had caused it. 

But the Gem is here, Pearl reminds herself with a grounding breath. There is a heavy Pink Diamond between her hands, whole, untarnished, even glimmering. Pink is fine. Healing. All according to plan. 

She whispers to the stone: “Everything will be alright, my Di—” Her hands twitch. “My Quartz. I promise.”

(She’s not entirely certain which of them she’s more trying to reassure.)

* * *

Organics, that is _native_ organics, that is _humans_ —sleep. She’s seen it herself, once, while accompanying Rose back before this ordeal turned into a full-fledged war. 

Gems do not sleep. 

Now, Pearl almost wishes she did, because in these long hours—the sun rising and falling and rising again and again and again outside the cave as the Earth spins on its axes—with nothing else to do and no one to distract her, she thinks of Bismuth and all the others they’ve lost.

(Later, after the Corrupting Light, she will look back at these recollections and laugh bitterly at how naïve she had been. At how much worse it had all become.)

* * *

She herself has had her physical form destroyed countless times over the past thousand years, in the heat of battle, mostly putting herself between her Diamond and whatever foe she was facing. Pearl had been horribly outmatched against Jaspers and Amethysts and Ruby fusions—especially at first, in those awkward, embarrassing days when she was still learning to _hold_ a sword—but that hadn’t mattered. She’d protected Pink. And she’d gotten better, _learned_ how to fight even if she hadn’t been built for it. And she learned how to re-form, and re-form well.

(As far as she knows, Pink has never had to re-form. Does she even know how?!)

( _What if_ …?!)

“I’m here, my Quartz,” Pearl whispers. 

(In the deafening silence that follows, she will wonder whether those words were meant more as reassurance or as a plea.)

* * *

Garnet has probably stepped up as _de facto_ leader, Pearl thinks, as the senior-most remaining member of the Crystal Gems. Has she seen them coming back? Does she know that they’re alright and has she assured the others? Or has she, like she promised, refrained from using her future vision on Rose? She must have heard that Rose shattered Pink Diamond by now—does she assume that she was apprehended? Apprehended and shattered? And that Pearl had been shattered too trying to protect Rose?

It’s better this way, she thinks. Better for the Crystal Gems to assume that the two of them are gone and then be relieved when they return…whenever that may be. And even if it weren’t, there had been no other choice. Even if she had gone back to base with the Gemstone—made up a story about how Homeworld had apprehended Rose and destroyed her physical form but how she, Pearl, had managed to rescue her before they’d shattered her—the others would be expecting a Rose Quartz Gemstone. She couldn’t appear with a Pink Diamond Gem without revealing Rose’s identity. And that wasn’t an option.

(Later, thousands of years later, she will tell Steven _I was your mother’s sole confidant._ When she does, she will have something like pride in her voice. And she will _feel_ pride. But she’ll feel something else too, in her Gem-wrenching aloneness, especially without Rose there any more to share the secrets.)

(At _this_ moment, alone in the cave, she doesn’t yet feel pride.)

* * *

_What if_ …?!

* * *

Her fingers _ache_. For three weeks (twenty-one sun-cycles), save for the moments when she’s heard drones, she’s gripped Pink’s Gem between them with a tender firmness. It’s a heavy stone. But the choice is between holding it in her increasingly wary hands, and laying it on the dusty cave floor, so there’s really no choice at all. As long as she is there to prevent it, her Diamond will not lay on the ground.

* * *

_What if she doesn’t re-form?!_

Pearl freezes the instant she is able to fully articulate the terrible question to herself, and when she does, hot tears well up in her eyes. She bites down hard on her bottom lip to keep from sobbing.

She will re-form, she _will_ , she _has to_!

( _What if she doesn’t?!_ What will Pearl do alone on this nowhere planet, in some backward galaxy in some random corner of the universe? What will she do without her Diamond? Without _Rose?!_ An ownerless Pearl, officially marked as a renegade by Homeworld, stranded alone, with nowhere to go. When Pink said, _If we lose, we’ll be killed, and if we win, we can never go home_ , Pearl had agreed anyway, because it didn’t matter where they were, as long as Pearl was with her Diamond. Why in the cosmos would she want to go back to Homeworld if her Diamond was on Earth? But it had never occurred to her that she might be stuck here _without_ Pink! And then…and then…!) 

(What if she _does_ re-form, but no longer wants anything to do with Pearl? If the fake shattering was more painful than she’d expected, and she can’t forgive Pearl for hurting her like that, and…and…!)

The tears furiously roll down Pearl's face as she sits, silently shaking, against the cave wall, watches her already-pale fingers become even whiter as in an effort to restrain herself she clenches the Gemstone harder.

* * *

Four weeks after the staged shattering—that’s twenty-eight sun-cycles—the Gem in Pearl’s hands starts to glow, illuminating the dim cave with a warm, pink light. She releases it with bated breath as it floats upward, kneels as the form of Rose Quartz bursts from it and gently lands on the ground.

“Are…are you alright, my Quartz?”

“Just _Rose_ now, Pearl,” the first voice other than her own that Pearl has heard in a month says gently, and Rose smiles as she offers a hand to help Pearl off her knee. “And I’ve never been better.”

* * *

(Thousands of years later, Steven will cradle Pearl’s Gemstone gently in his hands, after he accidently gets her impaled with a sword— _his_ fault—as he, Garnet, and Amethyst warp back to the house. 

“Don’t worry, Pearl,” he’ll say, cushioning a wicker basket with his favorite blanket and laying her Gemstone in it. “Everything’s gonna be okay. I promise.”)

**Author's Note:**

> I really enjoyed writing this one! Hope you enjoyed too!
> 
> Comments are my bread and butter!


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